11 Comments
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Nick Kranz's avatar

Oski appears to have a cigarette in a couple of these pictures, but they're grainy enough that I'm not sure.

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KetamineCal's avatar

They definitely dressed him up with a cig. Can tell it's not built-in because it switches sides of his mouth and the angle.

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Debbie's avatar

As depicted in one of your pictures above, Oski used to climb up the goal post to stand on it before football games. Until one year (in the '60s?) when Oski fell off and broke his leg. Since the person inside the Oski suit is supposed to be anonymous, there was a student wearing a cast to class the following week who had to make up a story about how he broke his leg. And the tradition of standing on the goal post was discontinued.

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Ben's avatar

There's a great Youtube video we'll share in a later post talking about that exact event! Or share now! https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=2VYyQYuPyT8

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GoldenBear88's avatar

That must have been an interesting game. Do you know if we won or lost? What did the crowd do when he fell off?

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Paul Raich's avatar

100% we need to find out what game.

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GoldenBear88's avatar

Paul: I'm going to go out on a limb and say it was probably Oregon State. Wierd, fluky things seem to happen when they come to Berkeley.

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Paul Raich's avatar

Hey a belated thanks. I think I want to research this incident

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Terence's avatar

I think something that must exist digitally is Oski throwing a cake on Gary Payton’s family in 1990. Televised game with one of the Pac-10’s best players and his Oakland home coming. And I believe the cake

was a birthday cake for someone at the game too.

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KetamineCal's avatar

Gonna have nightmares about bucktoothed Oski now.

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Debbie's avatar

I was about 10 years old at the time, so it was obviously a traumatic event for me to still remember it all these years later. If I had to guess, it was the first home game of 1966 against Michigan - which Cal lost (they had a losing record that year), but since it wasn't a Pac-8 game and it was probably before school started, I'm guessing it wasn't very well-attended. I hadn't remembered that they carried Oski off in a stretcher (see the UTube video). What I remembered was that they tried to play it off as part of the bit - like he meant to do that.

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